


Kanaya, About Your Girlfriend

by TalkingAnimals



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcoholism, F/F, M/M, Meteorstuck, Multi, Past Character Death, Retcon Timeline, suicide talk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 18,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7281616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalkingAnimals/pseuds/TalkingAnimals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This might be, had you ever grazed a text about addiction, something that might be called a bottom. Maybe not rock bottom, but enough of a sacrifice to your general set of sensibilities and morals that a particularly sensitive person could begin to see a problem with their lifestyle. Enough of a shock to be a wakeup call for someone still invested in their own life. You might be aware of the concept if, freshly thrust into the world of double-digit ages, you watched your mother’s ability to care for you decline and began searching for ways to understand her. To care for her, potentially, if you had to see her decline beneath her own standards. If the “functioning” ever dropped off from before the rest of her descriptors. If you were wide-eyed, optimisitic and trusting enough to believe alcoholic adult men you’d never met to understand your mother better than you could.</p><p>But, of course, none of that could be the case. You know yourself as someone who would never allow herself to be that vulnerable, so that couldn’t have happened.</p><p>--</p><p>Post-retcon Rosemary dealing with Rose's alcoholism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Newlyweds

**Be Rose Lalonde**

You are, to indulge in earth colloquialisms, drunk off your fucking ass.

You and Kanaya are sitting outside the meteor complex, inside a dream bubble with a couple of trolls whose names you vaguely recognize from conversations between Karkat and her. Kanaya is crouched metres away with the two girls of the group, Feferi curling her fingers idly around strands of the red one's hair. Your short term memory is, to continue your vernaculary indulgence, fucked to high shit, but you recall Feferi's name by repetition from Kanaya. Your train of thought rides into a particularly blurred collection of memories layered on top of another, Kanaya in mixed positions on different nights anxiously soliloqueying to you about the girl killed by the boy who blew a hole through her stomach. Something stirs within you every time the subject inevitably spills out from behind her casual nighttime conversations with you, but it's usually floated back out of you in a sea of liquor by the time she's switched subjects. You're drifting mentally into warm memories of Kanaya when you feel a jolt through your arms, your body feeling the cold meteor pressed under the heels of your hands as it spits your focus back out from the inside of your head. Right, you remember, you're supposed to be spending some quality time with Salt Licks. Sollicks. Whatever. You're supposed to be talking to the half dead kid.

You slowly knock your head over from one shoulder to the other to look at him, trying to maintain the illusion that your drunken stumble down memory lane was a moment of pensive, sober contemplation. Even without pupils you can tell he is pointedly avoiding looking at you. You don't take it personally; he's already exhibited himself as somewhat weird and uncomfortable and twitchy and it ripples through every part of him as he fidgets on the cold meteor ground. His foot taps rapidly but as silently as possible, one of his hands gathering up meteor dirt and spreading it back down in a small spot beside his left hip. The other one taps his thigh and you catch his tongue try to flick over his front teeth periodically. You sense it has something to do with his half-dead affliction, but you watch his front teeth phaze in and out of existence every few seconds, which, now that you continue to stare at his teeth and speculate, might have something to do with his constant re-evaluation of the inside of his mouth. Your original point stands, though: this dude is is an absolute fucking mess of discomfort. His anxious manner amuses you in a way you feel no inclination to interact with, but watching his body language is engaging enough to keep you focused. He seems mostly nonverbal as a rule, making almost no conversation when Kanaya excitedly started engaging what you assume are his two girlfriends. Sweet setup, bro, you think to yourself and laugh so hard you watch him jump as you fall backwards onto your hands. Fuck, it's hard keeping composure when you know exactly the kind of shit that makes you laugh and are in exactly the state of mind to do so. If only he knew the untold joys of ironically broing it up with yourself over the idea that you're a possession. He'd love it. Actually, come to think of it, you know a grand total of zero things about him at this point, and could possibly stand to do some actual recon on this half-dead troll boy. At the very least, you could find out if his name is _actually_ Salt Licks.

"So, Saltlicks," Your tongue throws itself around your mouth with reckless abandon as you don't pay the usual attention to focusing your words. You've actually gotten much better at hiding signs of slurring and general drunkenness from the Scooby gang on the meteor, but you're unhinged as hell and figure you might as well pretend you're saying his name right under all the garbled speech.  
He corrects, you, despite your efforts,

"Sollux,"

Though there's a considerable lapse of time between the end of your pronunciation and his. Your estimation that the dude's not one for words seems to be panning out nicely.

"How's," you gurgle-- _shit_ , maybe you're letting this happen less than you think you are,

"existence torn between the world of the "dead" and the living? How is it having one foot in expendability and one foot in necessity by paradox,"

Hiccup,

"--paradox space? How's it knowing omnipotent forces either can't, can't decide what they want to do with you or just, or just WANT you strung between two realities? Is it--"

You notice, with some delay, that he's shifted his weight onto one of his hands behind him and is now staring pointedly at you. He blinks away when you finally catch his gaze, but he's shifted his shirt into one that says clearly, "DON'T ASK ME ABOUT MY DISABILITY OR MY MORTALITY". You guess that at least answered if he inherited some of the more entertaining facets of post-mortem existence. You crack a smile and a laugh that must agree with him; you catch his mouth pull up in one corner as you lose yourself in his silent brand of humour. You realize the poor dude might think your hammered banter is human flirtation. Oh, bro, oh... _dude_.

You also realize you don't have to care because he's dead.

He clicks his tongue and finally forms a full sentence after a desert of silence, "Two half-empty refreshment pits," you've learned those are _cups_ ,

"Not mixed together into a full pit of fluid, though. They have nothing to fucking do with each other."

Trolls aren't particularly prone to metaphor, so you wonder if he's putting it on for your sake. Or he has no faith in human intelligence. Same concept, you muse; you've noticed troll's inclination towards benevolence is usually borne of a mixture of pity and frustration. Is he gonna expand on this concept? It takes this dude forever to pull together-- oh, fuck, he started talking while your brain was sinking back into its liquid contents again,

"--and you have aspirations, living or dead, that conflict with each other, that aren't even necessarily yours, you just have to hear them bang together in your head and under your skin constantly. It's fucking agonizing."

He looks at the ground again, taps his claws a few times in the grey dirt, shifts his weight, clicks,

"The voices, too, there's, uh--" You listen to his voice trail off again, and focus on the imprint on your eardrums. His voice is hoarse and nasally, and you chew on images of him smoking cigars through his nose for years of his life, because you're a poet and you fucking love visual metaphor. Or you're a prose writer and visual metaphor is strictly a visual artist's medium. Either way, the dude is basically snorting gravel at you while he unearths his inner turmoil to a drunk girl who thinks his name is Salt Lick,

"--of the imminently dead, I have to fucking hear the voices of everyone who I used to know getting blasted out of existence somewhere in paradox space."

Hmm, it sounds like you're missing something important,

"Voices of the imminently dead and imminently double-dead. Somebody really loves to double-down on the psionic _psuffering_ ," he lisps with focused effort on the last word. You assume it's a joke. You laugh 30 seconds too late, and too short.

"HEY--" you pitch in, too excitedly, drifting further away from consciousness (in your defense, you had just finished drinking when Kanaya came to get you),

"--does that work for, suicides, too? Attempted? Me and Dave, me and Dave a while ago, went towards the green sun on a little attempted suicide mission, any green sun suicide convos between pals you remember hearing? I'd be _so_ interested to hear--"

"No," He cuts you off for once. You're fading out too hard to tell that you've miffed him.

He doesn't continue.

Instead, he bounces up onto his feet and drifts over to Feferi and, shit...A labia? Ha ha, fuck, what was her _name_ , you snort to yourself as you watch them re-unite.

It's a nice night.

You let yourself fall backwards, arm over your forehead, paradox space stars and cracks spinning and blurring together. You let your eyelids fall together, feeling your perspective re-adjust, re-adjust, re-adjust as liquor bastes your brain. It's a nice night.

"Um- Rose?"

You crack an eye and Kanaya is perched over you, smile benevolent and eyebrows hitched upwards in concern. You absolutely adore her. You love... _her_. Fuck. Shit, she's wonderful. Fuck. Behind her, the three other trolls regard you, Feferi with her hand knitted through...the red one's, you'll remember her real name later-- Salt Luxe is regarding you severely and, maybe it's the drunken optimism taking the wheels but, it's not unkindly. He nods towards Kanaya then, with some hesitation, towards you, before flying off. Feferi gives you both an absolutely massive wave goodbye while her red girlfriend glances back a smile just, you think, not to be upstaged by Salt Locks in basic friendliness.

Kanaya crouches down next to you, hand running lightly over a wisp of hair covering your forehead.

"I apologize for keeping you up, I didn't realize how late it was for you. I hope you didn't mind Sollux, I know he's not the most friendly troll but I assumed you wouldn't have trouble with him."

You grin, your hot cheeks pressing up into your eyelids,

"He was an existential nightmare, absolutely depressing with a morbid sense of humour and without a lick of patience. I loved him. Invite him over to see us any time." She smiles. You give her a look that feels _dreamy_ but probably looks _hammered_ as she gently helps you up. You smash your face into hers with am amount force her mouth tells you she wasn't expecting. She kisses you back, more politely than you've _ever_ wanted, and plants one more on your jaw before turning back towards the complex.

**Be past Kanaya**

Your matesprit is bowled over with laughter in front of Sollux. You don't know if Sollux knows what to do with human expressions of joy, and he seems to be keeping to himself as he watches her. He's not unkind, but you feel somewhat bad for the both of them, sicking their two personalities on each other. Rose is absolutely boisterous at times and, while charming to you, might not exactly be Sollux's cup of scalding lead fluid. Feferi grabs your attention -- literally, you twitch, she's extremely physical -- and fills your sound drums with stories of her, Sollux and Aradia that the two of them should probably be telling themselves and, really, might not want to share in the first place.  Aradia regards her severely. Feferi absolutely fails to notice.

You've missed them.

**Be past Sollux**

You were going to be a total asshole on your way out, but you feel yourself begrudgingly softening as you stare down at Rose sprawled on the meteor ground. You don't know how she talks about it, or why she talks about it, or why she's so fucking clueless and abrasive about it, but something shifts inside you as you realize it's nice to have someone bring it up. Fuck her for bringing it up so casually, but a "fuck you" with no real conviction or meaning behind it.

You make an effort to actually look at her when she gets up, nodding so maybe she'll know you appreciated the conversation without you actually having to say anything.

You leave.

**Be past Sollux, 7 minutes earlier**

Fuck her. Fuck her because she has no fucking idea what it's like to constantly hear the voices of trolls who live close to death, who never escape, who you know think about nothing else because you're constantly hearing them fucking screaming. To constantly hear your own voice, with words you'd never say out loud being screamed beside your head. Fuck her and her bullshit fucking questions and her bullshit philosphizing around your mental fucking agony. Fuck her fuck her fuck her.

**Be Sollux**

You ask Aradia a question.


	2. Suite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some drug-induced derealization near the end of this chapter

**Be past Rose.**

You dryly wish your mom a good morning as she walks by you, rubs your hair, corrects you:  it's night.

You're both wrong.

It's dusk.

**Be Rose.**

Everything oozes a warm golden glow around you. Your room, filled to the brim with foraged antiques from meteor rooms, hums around you and seeps into you with what you might be inclined to call benevolence, if you believed in such a thing. Stemless cup of wine perched on your lap, you watch the red liquid pool from one end of the cup to the other and fall as you fail to monitor its movement adequately, spreading gracelessly outwards once it hits the sheets. It doesn't matter. You're stretched between seconds and you're -- home's not the right word, but you're real, at least. You feel the cool stain on your left leg and bunch your covers with a palm that hums, the sensation new despite its mundane roots. Everything old is new again. You swing your legs over the side of the bed.

Kanaya is at the door by the time you organize yourself enough to approach it. You're tipsy, but not visibly drunk, and you pride yourself on your ability to maintain your usual persona enough to be present during the day. It really is just the edge of the morning you need to take off, and you're essentially flying miles ahead of your meteor peers after you get your daily affairs in order. Then you're free to indugle as openly as you like when everyone's convinced a sober day of work is behind you.

Your right arm slips into the hall and around Kanaya's waist; you follow. Her hip bones shift under your skin as she walks, pushing into your wrist and elbow, and a few of her ribs pass up and down along your clavicle. You get the feeling your arm has taken you for a bit of a ride, here. You feel her laughing.

"Rose," you watch her lips pull up over her teeth, getting hung up on one side, and you think she's trying to stop herself,

"As much as I appreciate the attention, I really don't think this will benefit either of us in the presence of Vriska."

You kind-of, shift her over and lean the both of you against a wall, arm over her shoulders and heads pressed together in a show of conspiratorial behaviour. Really, you just need to sober up, but you want to make her 'Feel A Part Of', as it were. Who said that? It must be some great thinker's concept for a banale human experience. Feel A Part Of. Men never tire of the masturbatory habit of re-arranging average concepts until they can convince people they're significant again,

"Kanay~ya," You have trouble with the alternian inflection when you're not all put together. Vriska's convinced it's just because you're not that good at it, or she's smart and other's aren't, whatever her conception of the situation is. It's fine,

"You, are one of the most punctual people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting,"

(you catch her smile, even with the weird proximity/angle combination you're working with,)

"but _I_ am not someone with the burden of that reputation. What Vriska doesn't know about the origin stories behind my behaviours will literally never hurt her." You kiss her, too wet, too drunk, and think that maybe the cool pressure of her forehead was doing more wonders for you than you realized. You might worry you were in a pickle, if you didn't have all the time in the world.

A thought floats to the surface of your relatively unoccupied mind.

' **Be Vriska** ,'

Hah! That would clear a few things up for you in your current -- what's a step down from a predicament? There's no way a bit of underestimated breakfast quantities and light tardiness should constitute a _real_ pr

You are now **Vriska Serket**.

Kanaya and her human are late. Rose the human and your Kanaya are late. Whatever!!!!!!!! They are both late, is the point. You have far too many irons in the fire for this, a fact which other passengers should never take for granted. They are all their own individual irons in YOUR fire, and they should have the good graces to remember it. People aren't saved from dooming a timeline just to be tardied on! Tardied at? Good self-correction instinct, Vriska. Always getting stronger with each passing second!!!!!!!! Tardied at!!!!!!!! You are being tardied at. It's a direct attack on your person, your training program, AND the sanctity of the alpha timeline for which you are wholly responsible.

Unacceptable!!!!!!!!

If YOU were the Lalonde human, you would at least have the gall to--

You are now **the Lalonde human**.

"KANAYA!!!!!!!!"

Although this would be a situation in which, unquestionably, it would be much easier to be Vriska Serket.

But you don't have any control over that.

"Vriska. I see you've completely abandoned your trainees to attend to the two _least_ remedial students you have under your claw. How thoughtful."

She's so mean. You love her. You lean over to tell her, catching her hand on the tip of your nose. It bounces gently back into place as you, slowly,

slowly,

get the hint and straighten back up.

Vriska is yelling

Vriska is yelling at your girlfriend, not you.

Kanaya is stiff and you see her knotted skin tighten at the edge of one of her eyes.

She is not the one who is making you late.

Vriska knows she is not the one who is making you _both_ late.

You step forward, uncalculated, clumsy -- out of sync, but without your knowledge.

And you your mouth opens,

"Vriska,"

and then it begins to speak for you.

You are no longer present.

Your voice is saying things for you that you do not have the time to process. Too quick, too loud, too drunk, too obvious. You feel like you are not this Rose any more, and she is saying too many thing, revealing too much, desperate and angry and she tells Vriska too many things you want to say to her to keep up appearances any longer. Criticizing her methods and making wild accusations and building her up to retaliate, to wonder _why_ , to probe Kanaya, to completely ruin what you have going. To destroy everything.

Your control floats inches, feet above your left shoulder and you watch yourself do this. You think about the appropriate thing to do and it's meaningless. 

You finally, finally start to catch yourself, falling back into your face and you're feeling it burn, lips pulled tight to seal off your thoughts and hot wet anger slick on your eyes.

Vriska's lip is tight, high on her face, one fang sucked almost entirely into her mouth. One eye considers you, and even with distance you can watch it quickly vibrate.

"Fine!" She spits, throws her hands up in the air, waves them left, right with her thrown-back head,

"fine, Lalonde! If you were so-o-" (you hear her count 8 beats),

"determined, to go off and train on your own, you didn't need to make a big dramatic show of it! I'm perfectly happy to let _you_  make foolish decisions for the sake of learning from your mistakes. Please! Go make them by yourself. It's my duty as a leader to tell you to larv off and go make your own mistakes elsewhere, away from the passengers who _actually_ want to learn the correct way, and to come _crawling_ back to me when you completely fail and come back to your senses!" She sniffs, turns to Kanaya,

"But I _won't_ have you pulling Kanaya down with you! She's too _smart_ to go along with anything like that."

She pauses,

"Too careful,"

and smirks.

"I'm meddlesome." Kanaya cuts dryly.

Vriska glares.

To Kanaya, then to you.

And then she turns, throws a wave back that is blatantly calculated in its casualness, and stomps down the hall with wholly uncalculated anger.

Good.

So, you managed to make that even better for yourself, you think. There is a prick, or a few pricks, small on the back of your mind, and you feel them, but you are not listening. You don't need them. You are going to get done what needs to be done, and you are going to learn to trust yourself. No more worrying about what Rose has to say. You are letting her navigate.

 

Good.


	3. Confide

**You are still Rose Lalonde.**

Your training sessions with Kanaya are going well.

You’ve got a lot of energy, power, _force_ at your disposal, because you're comfortable letting it move through you; you’re not afraid to let it speak for itself. You have a conversation, you think, with forces inside of you, and the results are amiable for all parties involved. They work well with Kanaya, too, and she works well back. You’re not sure, you muse, if the same level of negotiation is necessary on her end, but she’s focused, she's intense and, for the most part, she can generally handle you. Generally.

A few times, though, you’ve knocked her off her feet a little too hard, been a little too swept up in the moment: a miscalculation on your part, or an internal miscommunication that can be worked out easily for next time. The odd thing is, though, she always rushes to your side, frantic & worried, jade blood rising up to the underside of her coarse skin. An aesthetic level of battle wear peppering her arms and face, hands curled to mimic clawlessness, eyes wet, & pupils dilated. She speaks fast, knuckles brushing your arm, apologizing despite a sizeable bruise forming underneath her right iris, and you laugh it off, hugging her tight around the neck and feeling her hands slack at your sides. Some people look after themselves by looking after others, you muse.

One day you’ll have to tell her you really never need it.

**Continue being Rose.**

One night in your room, you catch your girlfriend drawing.

Angled away as you write, left hand curled around her paper, you catch the corner of a distinctly languageless line moving out from the top of her index finger. It hints at something vaguely mammalian, and your shoulders slide, slowly, to just behind hers. It looks vaguely skunklike, with teeth sticking out in ugly directions and shaky points that make it look somewhat wilted. You think, irrelevant of the skill involved in rendering, it seems like a creature who is trying its best not to seem gruesome.

It suits her.

You tell her so.

She screams.

“Sorry, Kanaya,” you coo, & bite your cheek. She heaves. Her ugly-sweet skunk has an ink blob on its incizor. She holds her pen to her chest, delicately, a small trail of ink making its way towards her thumb.

You wonder, sometimes, if you really are far, far too much for her.

“I’m sorry; I’ve ruined your art. If this was your debut into the art world, I won’t forgive myself.” You take it easy on her and slide in a smile.

“No!” She assures, hand landing gently down on the paper.

“I’m not sure I’m cut out for it. You and Dave human have A Lot to say about art, and the things Dave shows me are so frivilous, I always think it would be nice to create art like that: without any pressure, or real goal, or any complex reason to even do it. Alternia, I can imagine you’re surprised to learn,” –you love her over-affected deadpan– “is somewhat extreme in its treatment of the arts. I would love to not be forced to create like that, with that kind of external pressure.”

You nudge her rib with a knuckle, “I think you’ve transformed it into an internal pressure somewhere along the line,” you muse,

“screaming isn’t a response most of us like to have to our craft even on good days.”

She shoots you a look that you can’t quite understand.

You shift, reaching over her lap and letting hand rest on her leg as you grab the bottle of wine. You let it linger there for just a moment before you pour yourself another glass.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see her shoulders relax.

**Be Kanaya  
**

You think you might be skirting a kismessitude with the human you’ve courted as a matesprit, and you are not sure if she knows. 

There was, if you’re frank with yourself, always a level of black flirting at play between you two: the intentional antagonizing you chalked up to a level of friendly flirting present in human courtship & Rose’s general knack for piercing comments layed a hive platter onto which tonnes of black intimacy could easily be built. But you really thought courting her for a straightforward red romance was the conscientious thing to do. Human sensibilities dictate that redrom is the only romance form, and you tried to be accomodating! The disillusionment, anger and frustration on which your romance has been built shouldn’t be something you can’t push away and distract yourself from. You don’t have trouble re- arranging your expectations for some, and Rose comes from a culture of pity, so why are you having so much trouble trying not to hate her?

Because she gives you reasons! She goads you, she underestimates you intentionally, she overstays her welcome and she ropes you into disasters! Why does she Show Her Boat so recklessly if she’s not raised to understand what it makes you want to do? And you react, you push back, your training sessions are grandeur displays of black affection that no one is even present for but you! Who could she be putting them on for? You? _Herself_? You say things you know will make her clumsy, make her misstep, misfire, knock you off your feet and leave her looking irresponsible and formless. And you pick her back up every time, vacillations so profound they run your brain through a wall, apologies sprinkled through the air and shame, pity, compassion running through your veins as you confront your anger being too big, too strong, too _real_ for her to understand. And you know she can’t, because she laughs it off, confused  & careless and you know she doesn’t understand what has happened between you two. She doesn’t know she orchestrated an entire ritual of hatred between the two of you without even breaking a sweat. Without even considering it.

You’re not supposed to have unrequited feelings for someone you’re already dating. You’re sure that, even on earth, that’s not something you’re supposed to be ignoring.


	4. Swings

**Be Rose Lalonde.**

You wake up in bed.

Which is fine; that's always a good place to wake up, and it's certainly a reasonable activity to be doing in a bed.

It does trouble you, however, because a second ago you were definitely still talking to Dave and Kanaya in the dining room.

You look around: Your phone is out of batteries. Nothing in your room is where you left it. You try and uncaptalogue your charger.

You try to uncaptalogue your charger with a slightly less coherent set of sorting priorities.

Aha.

As it charges, you uncaptchalogue the bottle of wine you'd been saving to celebrate with. There _was_ a genuine cause for celebration: you'd all just finished your first successful group training session as an ensemble. Your current training arrangements with Kanaya notwithstanding, it was the first and only successful tactical meeting you'd all had in a long time. Vriska had challenged your progress from across one of the hallways and your back and forth with her had escalated until it became a genuinely productive exchange of fraymotifs and assorted combat techniques between the six of you. You were surprised to learn how much power Terezi and Karkat had at their disposal without god tiering; even with the obvious extra strain they were keeping up better than you would have guessed. With a Pop from the bottle's cork you're reminded: this is a white! You went with such a frivolous choice in beverages for the occasion, and no one is even here to enjoy it. You chalk it up to their own reservations, filling in the blanks of what you assume must have been a wild night for the entire crew. You needn't be _too_ hard on yourself for indulging in a legitimate night of celebration, disorienting though it is.

You'll need to remember to congratulate Karkat and Terezi next time you see them.

Your hand glides over the screen of your charging phone, left thumb enticing it out of its, frankly, stubborn refusal to wake up and start funneling information straight into your brain. It's still technically the 21st century on this rock, so it has no excuse to withhold information from you for this long.

Its contents Blip into existence.

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 00:10 --

TG: man i know youre like

TG: crazy drunk or whatever but when you come back can you like

TG: NOT talk to me about alien anatomy for like 20 solid minutes again

TG: maybe texting you this instead of just saying it will like

TG: cement this into your drunken mind

TG: roooo ooo oooo ssseeee this is gho o o st of your concept of shame speaking

TG: and you need to fucking

TG: tone it the fuck down

TG: not even for my sake man I think karkat was gonna just start puking at one point

TG: like just from pure unadulterated secondhand embarrassment

TG: ok actually scratch that it might just be because kanaya is like his childhood friend or whatever

TG: but you know man like

TG: cool it

TG: was basically the thesis to this miniature essay you just had the pleasure of reading

TG: man are you ever coming back from the bathroom or what

TG: you better not be hurling in there because I honest to god to not know how to find like 95% of the bathrooms in this place

TG: or Load Gapers or whatever the fuck

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 01:15 --

TG: uhhh ok dude were all definitely going to bed and you should too if thats  
not like

TG: already where you went

TG: or maybe you went to go like

TG: antagonize vriska or something who fuckin knows

TG: but like

TG: yeah

TG: go to bed dude

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 01:21 --

TG: sober up

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

Hm. How comforting. You feel your nose pull back into your face as you scroll up and down the conversation. People on this meteor would due to properly relax every once in a while. Dave in particular needs to understand what it means to give up on people. He's already failed at it once; he might as well try to adopt the skill when more than one life in at risk this time. It's nauseating.

You scroll through the conversations. Karkat seems to be the only one who didn't have something to say to you last night; you consider clicking through to Terezi's for what is probably a paragraph's worth of threatening non-sequiturs to laugh at, but your thumb inevitably hovers over your girlfriend's chumhandle.

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 00:22 \--

GA: Rose

GA: Your Sideways Lusus Is Talking To Me About Earth Phenomenon I Do Not Understand

GA: And Anticipating Reactions I Could Not Possibly Give

GA: Is He Always Like This

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] ceased pesterting tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 00:27 --

GA: Karkat Is Equally Befuddled But He Is Not Letting On That Such Is The Case

GA: And Is Nodding Sagely At Believable Intervals

GA: He Is Doing Very Well I Think

GA: The Dave Human Is Pacified

GA: And You Are Still Absent For No Immediately Obvious Reason

GA: Which Is Unfortunate Because This Is Exceptionally Thrilling

GA: In Fact I Am Formulating A New Unit Of Measurement Based On The Ratio Of Karkat's Sage Nods To Dave's Overall Wordcount

GA: I Am Charting The Waxing And Waning Of Karkat's Fascinated Confusion Re: Dave's Entire Human Existence

GA: It Really Is Something

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] ceased pesterting tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 01:12 --

GA: Karkat Has Upended His Meal Sack All Over His Legs

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

You're smiling. You rub your mouth without thinking; relax those pesky muscles.

\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 00:47 --

GC: H3Y ROS3

GC: R3ALLY COOL OF YOU TO COM3 H4NG OUT FOR L1K3 3 4ND 4 H4LF 34RTH S3CONDS

GC: 4ND TH3N L3AV3

GC: BUT 1 W1LL B3 TH3 MOST TRUSTWORTHY OF CONF1D4NTS D3SP1T3 YOUR TOT4L L4CK OF 34RTH M4NN3RS

GC: OUT OF TH3 GOODN3SS OF MY H3ART

GC: B3C4US3 1 KNOW HOW MUCH YOU LOV3 B31NG 4 SH1FTY B1TCH FOR NO R34SON 4LL TH3 T1M3

GC: 3V3N THOUGH TH3 TH1NGS YOU 4R3 TRY1NG TO K33P S3CR3T N3V3R S33M L1K3 TH4T B1G OF 4 D34L TO M3!!

GC: BUT YOU C4N COM3 B4CK 4NY T1M3 YOU W4NT TO B3 W31RD 4ND CONSP1RATOR14L OV3R NOTH1NG 4G41N

GC: B3C4US3 1T W4S K1ND OF FUN >:]

Hm. You have no idea what that one is about. You decide to let it fester until the absolute possible worst moment it could inevitably bubble up. You can't resist the opportunity to be the subject of what you can only assume will be some very satisfying dramatic irony.

Sip,

Sip.

You confess you are holding your breath a little for the last set of messages.

\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 23:42 --

AG: WOW!!!!!!!!

AG: I cannot 8el8ve YOU of all people were the first one to give up and fall asleep!!!!!!!!

AG: After all your 8ragging!!!!!!!! A8out your am8zing training sessions!!!!!!!!

AG: A8solutely red8culous!!!!!!!!

You get the feeling the high from the successful meeting must have gotten to her. You've never seen such an excess of octupled exclamation points on your screen at once.

AG: If you're so set on this ridiculous idea if tr8ning alone we're going to have to check up on you!!!!!!!!

AG: Make sure you're not slacking off!!!!!!!!

You're mid-chuckle when you realize.

Scrolling down confirms it.

AG: Terezi and I are w8king you up TOMORROW!!!!!!!! Be ready to do some REAL training!!!!!!!!

AG: We're keeping our eye on you!!!!!!!! Starting NOW! >::::::::)

Fuck.

You don't even look at the time; you know yourself and how long you enjoy recharging for. As you're rushing to launch yourself out of bed and be convincingly presentable, you already hear one of eight knocks beginning to hit the door of your room.

Whatever Karkat's messages had to say can obviously wait.


	5. Hiccup

You have been staring at your phone screen for what you’re inclined to describe as a _conspicuous_ amount of time.

You’ve been pulling the screen up and down, consistently comparing the 2 chumhandles on your screen: one you were otherwise completely certain was Karkat’s, and the is other attached to your only remaining unread messages.

You’re waiting for more conclusive evidence for what to expect before you open it. Something to guide you through your own Billy’s Trail of meteor exploits you’re still in the dark about from last night. You’re just waiting for a bit of…context, you’ll say. An introductory paragraph leading into the confounding body you’re preparing to throw yourself into.

You scroll back up to your conversation with Terezi.

-– tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 13:43 –-

TT: Hello, Terezi.

GC: ROS3!

GC: F1N1SH3D L1CK1NG YOUR WOUNDS? >:]

TT: Hm.

TT: I can’t say I’m surprised you and Vriska think there’s any shame whatsoever in losing a completely one sided ambush,

TT: But no.

GC: ROS3 TH4T 1S SO BOR1NG

TT: I have something else to ask you.

GC: 1T’S SO MUCH MOR3 FUN 1F YOU JUST PL4Y 4LONG! >:[

GC: OH?

GC: SOM3TH1NG JUC13R TH4N POST-STR1F3 J33R1NG? >:]

TT: It’s possible.

TT: It seems like I was busier last night than even I can fully account for.

TT: And my celebratory over-achieving is forcing me to tie up so loose ends.

TT: So if you’ll tolerate some further conspiratorial behaviour, I might need to review this conversation I had with you last night again.

TT: Be a real Shifty Bitch. For old times’ sake.

GC: >:P

GC: ROS3 YOUR COMPL3T3LY B3N1GN S3CR3TS 4R3 R34LLY S4F3 W1TH M3

GC: BUT 1F W3 4R3 1NDULG1NG 1N SH1FTY B1TCH3RY JUST FOR TH3 FUN OF 1T

GC: TH3N I HOP3 YOUR R3N3ZVOUS 4ND COV3RT 4LT3RC4T1ONS W3NT SMOOTHLY

GC: >:]

TT: Oh, dear.

TT: Did I tell you about _all_ of those?

TT: I can’t imagine I would be so careless.

GC: ROS3 YOU 4R3 4CTU4LLY B3TT3R 4T TH1S TH4N 1 G4V3 YOU CR3D1T FOR

GC: M4YB3 1 SHOULD B3 MOR3 TOL3R4NT OF YOUR 34RTH BR4ND OF 1NS1NC3R3 S1NC3R1TY >:P

GC: BUT R34LLY 1 4M SORT OF GL4D YOU N3V3R W3NT 4ND G4V3 VR1SK4 4 P13C3 OF YOUR TH1NK LOBE

GC: SOM3T1M3S SH3 N33DS TO G3T ON3 UP ON YOU B3FOR3 SH3 IS R34DY TO L1ST3N TO WH4T YOU H4V3 TO S4Y

TT: Hmm. Noted.

TT: Anyway, Terezi, I have a previous engagement I have to attend to.

TT: But this was fun.

GC: SH11111FFTTYYYY!!!!!

GC: >:O >:O

Alright, so, you surmise it must have just been some unfinished business with Vriska you were discussing with Terezi last night, and not some well-kept secret about your plans for murderclown rendezvous. It’s possible he’s just been blowing up everyone’s phones in an attempt at contact, then. But you do want to know how he found you.

Tap.

–- terminallyCapricious [TC] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 03:41 –-

TC: hey

TC: ROSE HUMAN :o)

TC: im motherfucking delighted about being

TC: CHATTED AT

TC: last night

Your stomach drops into your toes.

You scroll up.

You rub your screen until you’re forced to concede: you haven’t had any previous conversations on this phone with him.

You were actually with him.

TC: :o)

TC: those vents get

TC: A LITTLE FUCKING LONELY

TC: all the days i dont get anybody to talk with

TC: :o) :o)

TC: if you ever wanna

TC: KICK THE WICKED SHIT AGAIN

TC: dont be motherfucking shy cuz there’s

TC: VENTS

TC: all over this motherfucking place

TC: HONK :o)

You scroll down a little further. You thought you were going to live through some of your own regrettable responses, but it’s literally pages of him soliloqueying into your pesterchum client. You jump around looking for something particularly damning or compelling among it but it’s mostly him talking about worshiping false jesters and using different kinds of laughs as a form of worship. Frankly, if he didn’t come with a body count in his history you might be inclined to find it slightly more interesting, but you find it a bit difficult to lose yourself in the concepts.

Scrolling down towards the bottom, though, you do notice one piece of text you find hard to ignore.

TC: thanks again for being

TC: SUCH A GOOD MOTHERFUCKING LISTENER

TC: karkat doesn’t have

TC: NEARLY THE PATIENCE YOU DO

TC: for listening to all this wicked divination

TC: BUT

TC: i think he might be motherfucking coming around :o)

Damning and compelling are probably both appropriate descriptors at this point.

 _Now_ who’s a shifty bitch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to the few of you who are keeping up with this. This is somewhat unfamiliar territory for me so I would love any feedback from the few of you who do read, I hope you're all enjoying what I'm doing with this :')


	6. Choke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning on this one for some pretty visceral depiction of mental illness

**Be Rose, 14 Hours ago**

You seek out the murderclown.

This might be, had you ever grazed a text about addiction, something that might be called a bottom. Maybe not rock bottom, but enough of a sacrifice to your general set of sensibilities and morals that a particularly sensitive person could begin to see a problem with their lifestyle. Enough of a shock to be a wakeup call for someone still invested in their own life. You might be aware of the concept if, freshly thrust into the world of double-digit ages, you watched your mother’s ability to care for you decline and began searching for ways to understand her. To care for her, potentially, if you had to see her decline beneath her own standards. If the “functioning” ever dropped off from before the rest of her descriptors. If you were wide-eyed, optimisitic and trusting enough to believe alcoholic adult men you’d never met to understand your mother better than you could.

But, of course, none of that could be the case. You know yourself as someone who would never allow herself to be that vulnerable, so that couldn’t have happened.

So you seek out the murderclown.

Walking here, you'd followed trails of vents in overwhelmingly complicated articulations as they escaped the confines of the rooms' walls, and after a certain point most of the landscape around you became twisted vent shafts, curling around each other in the space between metal wall fragments. The connecting metal box greeting all these vents shifts down until it becomes a room, and this room spans out to meet you in the form of a hallway, shadows cast in such a way as to obscure the actual length of the hall with a blanket of black air.

He shifts out of the darkness very deliberately, and you can appreciate the drama he invites. Green light bounces off one eye right before his gray skin starts painting itself into the air. He looks, soft. Not in a necessarily pleasant way, but his face lacks some of the more pronounced knotting and ridges of the trolls’ usual textured skin. Maybe it’s just the light, or the liquor, but he looks like he’s painted himself into the scene in front of you. There’s something inherently liminal about him. You admit it's somewhat distressing how little it feels like he’s actually occupying any space around you, and something is skittering around in your brain stem, scrambling frantically at the juncture of your neck. You can’t help but picture a gerbil trying to claw its way out, but you’re the cage, and you’re the table on which the cage is sat, and you’re the house in which the table is placed. So you’re not going anywhere.

“Gamzee,” You offer. He tilts his head.

A voice in the back of your head tells you this is a bit far to take your girlhood fascination with the macabre. You call it sexist. Men get to have real amitions and goals with their interests: why not you?

“Rose,” he hits back, and it’s the sureness that bugs you.

You uncaptalogue the bottle of wine.

He doesn’t flinch.

You’re already walking past him by the time he’s caught it in his hands.

“Come on.”

**Be Rose, 11 Hours ago**

You are leaning against the cold steel wall, your hair in a bunch above your head. It’s hooked on a screwhead, you think, or maybe it isn’t. You’ll figure out one way or the other inevitably. Gamzee is grinning, slick eyes narrowing more and more the more you talk. You are chatting, but you can’t hear yourself, about wine and the distilling process and the alchemy involved, and he is nodding every so slightly as light dances over his split pupils. They’re goatlike, you think, and watching orbs of light bounce off of them as they remain subbornly out of focus, they look unreal. You wonder if he’s taking information in with them or if they’re just there for display: two haunting, bewitching stones in his head as he watches you through his incizors. He feels like a ghoul; like a very ancient consort. You’re getting on amicably and he tells you about his religion; completely absurd but woven together with such a rich lore you’re almost convinced. You offer and interpretation and you swear the lights on his eyes all sync together. He’s enthralled, leaning over one knee and left hand’s claws flying through the air, gesticulating in time with every relevation he delivers. Excited, his wild hair and his horns meet in a soft circle, bouncing around his head as he expounds on the importance of different saints and jugglers, or saint-jugglers, you can’t actually keep straight what he’s talking about, and you find yourself home again. You’re comfortable; you’re invested in the kind of person you need him to be for you to survive. You, leaning against a third wall, watching the two of you conversing and understanding: you need this to survive. The both of you are strung together on a rope of liqour and the feelings of isolation have dug deep, deep into both your pores and if you had the chance to have this with the people who try to care about you you’re not sure if you even would. Your life and your girlfriend and your friends have too many artificial moments, stapled together and hanging on the reliance that Things Will Get Better and Feel Normal and you don’t know how to explain to anyone that it feels better to die with a stranger than to love them. Something churns deep, deep inside you as your girlfriend burns into your mind, her shadow on the walls of your skull as the ghost of her has to feel what you feel and your waking mind rushes back, angrily, and it’s fighting with you to feel w

you wake up in bed.

You are cold. Your clothes feel damp. You realize, with frustration, that it’s because you were in the middle of pouring yourself a drink. You put down the cup, and the bottle, and lie down. You stare at the ceiling.

You feel like the ceiling stares into you more than you're able to stare into it. It's gray, it's unwelcoming, it's hostile. If it had the chance to, it would probably kill you.

Maybe it's trying.

You think about your girlfriend and you’re, sad. You’re so, fucking sad and you can’t even be eloquent about it or put into words why you feel that way. You can’t explain to yourself what the words and the feelings you have inside yourself are even supposed to mean. You can’t even arrange them into something coherent. You heave.

You’re holding your hands on your face and crying. Like you’re a fucking teenage girl, like an idiot. You picture her and you think about yourself and you just fucking cry. You guess, you feel like you’re failing her. So, there’s a way to explain it. To organize the emotions, to give them a label. But it doesn’t fucking help. It’s not productive. It doesn’t tell you anything new, it doesn’t inspire meaning, it doesn’t move you from point a to point b, it just stays the same. Moves you backwards into yourself. 

You keep coming back here, because this is _you_. You’re tired of it. And when you wake up you’re going to have to be _her_ again and you fucking hate her. She thinks anything can ever be better and that she can solve any of these problems like what’s fundamentally wrong with you isn’t etched into the core of your being and that if you just keep trying you would make some real progress when you know you keep coming back here for a reason and it’s n

You wake up in bed.

Which is fine; that’s always a good place to wake up, and it’s certainly a reasonable activit

**Be Rose, 21 minutes ago.**

You call Kanaya.

You realize as she’s picking up: it’s conspicuous, it’s insincere, it’s overly formal and it invites questions: why call when you can just pester her like usual? Your throat clicks as she inhales on the other end and you feel her question you moments into the future. She’s going to ask what’s happening. What’s different.

But her voice pours out the other end, soprano with surprise, delighted and chatty and just the gentle rhythm of her speech click click clicking in your left ear. You’re pacified in the most mundane sense, soothed and calmed and curling yourself around your phone and onto the wall as she rambles out the speaker into the air. Lingering guilt and questions and blank memories swim in your mind but you’re too deep under the surface to bother. And somewhere beyond the shore of the lake in your mind you have an image of you shoving your own head into the water, anxieties and critiques bubbling up as your last breaths as emotion takes over and your life escaping your lips is the last disturbance in the still waters.

**Be Rose Lalonde.**

You think you might stop drinking for a while.

You tell Kanaya you’re coming over.

You are still  **Rose Lalonde**.

You are in your girlfriend's room.

You paint her nails.


	7. Chide

You are still **Rose Lalonde**. 

You watch your hand push her hair behind her ear, ring finger curving along the strand and circling out right under her jawline. You guess "ear" is a generous term; they're so unlike anything that would qualify for that category in the realm of earthen scientific inquiry. You want to call them "scales" but they're honestly more rock-like than anything, noticeably uneven on either side and layered over her temple like a few hundred thousand years of wind and rain had built them there. But still functionally ear-like enough to tuck a finger and a piece of hair behind absentmindedly.  
  
The strand is curled up onto her chin next to your hand, and you feel something stupid pull at your mouth when you look at her. She's smiling with a kind of patient bemusement that comes from watching your matesprit study your earlobes for over a minute.  
  
You lay down in an effort to change the subject.  
  
You decide to broach the topic of your not drinking with her. Accuse yourself of being sentimental: there's something about lying down face to face with her that makes you want to be honest.  
  
"I think, Kanaya, I'm being too lax with my approach to Vriska and her training sessions. Not that I would ever give her the benefit of the doubt on her leadership capabilities, but it's possible I've been a bit..." You catch yourself staring at your hand instead of her. You flick your nails.  
  
"I've been drunk a lot. It's distracting." Flick flick.  
  
You can feel her eyes on your twitching appendage and peripherally you catch them as they swing back up to you. The hot yellow of her eyes is distracting even at the extreme cusp of your vision. A finger and thumb slide over your wrist.  
  
"I don't know if you need to be that worried about Vriska's priorities. I think it's obvious to all of us that something serious is coming, it doesn't mean you have to neglect the things that help you function for her sake. She shouldn't always get things her own way."  
  
"Too much of a good thing isn't a problem on Alternia?" You muse, pushing your hand back over hers as it starts to curl on your arm. You watch her fingers hook back over yours as your twist of extremities starts to abstract in front of you. Like something alien and gastrointestinal. Braincells exposed to the air. One of them twitches as she answers.  
  
"I just don't think you need to worry too much about her priorities over yours. Or anyone's. Her ego doesn't need to take up space in other people's lives." You free a hand to rub the wrist of her other arm, curling over her to catch it as it rolls over her side.  
  
"Mm. We've got that in common. Is that what you liked about me, though?" Another alien look from her; your throat curls around itself.  
  
"I'm--"  
  
fingers uncurl, shifting weight onto your palm as she stares, keeps staring,  
  
"I'm not interested in pushing my own need to be right, too much, when it comes to being certain about things. A little uncertainty is necessary. You can't repeat the same process over and expect to uncover new things."  
  
There's a wet halo under one of her eyes, counterfeit iris floating on black sclera. She blinks it away, shifting.  
  
"Okay," she concedes, hand slowly tucking into the base of your hair. Far enough from the roots you can sense her more than feel her.  
  
You hover over her, slick eyes boring into you, and you watch your hand on her wrist because you're scared to kiss her. A ghost of you slams into the wall with the weight of it, like a stupid fucking teenager girl, condensing your problems into soundbites as if you're too dumb to understand what emotions mean. Like you need it spelled out for you.  
  
Your brain is falling out the sides of your eyes; she leans her head up, catches you with her mouth. Her hand runs down the side of your jaw and captures it all.  
  
You are still **Rose Lalonde.**  
  
It's 4 in the morning.  
  
You've gone through a bottle and a half of wine.  
  
Fuck sobriety and fuck making up artificial rules for yourself. Fuck the idea that you can't keep yourself grounded and communicate with the forces you need a clear line to. You have a part of you that needs to go, that doesn't need the opportunity to fortify so she can destroy you. You'll kill her first. The meek don't inherit shit if their only concern is breaking you down and making you meeker.  
  
You think you might be in a dream bubble.  
  
It's hard to tell, sometimes: your room feels distorted most days, so you can't always tell what colours and patterns are poking out where they shouldn't be. But the cool blues and purples gurgling up in the corners of your walls always tend to expose them. You're wondering, then:  
  
Your room has a window, large but obscured by sheets of metal except for a few small openings. Too secure to ever use effectively, but enough of a view to gather some critical information when it's needed.  
  
You get up, room follows: tracing your steps as your feet dig your way to the side of the room. You hold your head square by one of the holes exposing the crust of the meteor, heart slapping the wall in front of you when your eyes hit exactly what they were hoping to.  
  
"Hey. Sollicks. Aladia." You call.  
  
"Come here."  
  



	8. Chuckle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys sorry my fanfic is so sad. I promise this is one of the heaviest chapters for a while and then we all get to be less stressed collectively. Body horror warning for this chapter in particular.

==>

Sollux maintains this vaguely ominous floating action a few inches off the ground after he phazes in through your window. He stands in one corner of your room, tucked away despite the continuous bobbing up and down drawing your eye. He has a consistently cool palette, you notice, bouncing off your grey walls, and he almost starts to sink into them; even the deep black of his shirt blends in after a while. There's something cold about him inherently: tone, presence, demeanor.

Aradia's boiling hot, then.  


Maybe explosive is a better word; it's like she's boiling _over_. She makes this red hot contact with everything in your room, digging her claws into your bed sheets and hand pushing through the air as she speaks and moves her legs all over your floor. You watch the tips of her shoes hit everything in the metre of clearance in front of her as she pushes the ball of her foot across, and back.  
  
Maybe you're boiling over too. You can feel your face, hot and sticky with strands of your hair, and you can hear yourself howling. You're talking about your suicide mission -- Sollux filled her in, or you, you don't remember -- and she's doubling down on every miserable thing you throw at her. You catch Sollux finally start to settle down onto a surface the longer you regale them with the details of your death: the icy-hot of the sun's burn and feeling your muscles pull and split apart just inches away from your body's network rebuilding. The feeling of being put back together. 

And you could tell, you know you've never been in one but you just know, that's not what it feels like when a womb builds you up from your core. It doesn't feel like the icy hand of a stranger forcing you back together. Like 1,000 little electrical currents all slicing each other open until they cut into a new you. You're not even sure why you're torn up about being an artificial creation. Why you're giving any reverence to something you don't even have. But you picture these massive hands every time, clawed and masculine and clumsy, tearing you apart and putting you back together like they have any understanding of what you became after John made you. Like it could ever control you if it weren't literally ripping you apart.  
  
"What's a WOMB?" Aradia shrieks, and you laugh so hard you knock yourself back onto your sheets. Aradia is bent forward, holding her stomach. Sollux is doing...something. Shuffling in place or looking generally uncomfortable or _pretending_ to be disinterested in your conversation. Who cares. Aradia looks up at you, hair piled in front of her eyes as she catches yours.  
  
"Can we have one?" She grins,  
  
"A corpse party?"  
  
== >  
  
You are lying, ceremoniously, on the carpet on your floor. Your bed has been shoved against a wall so you can access every corner of the rug, in true corpse party aesthetic. Aradia is reading your vows. You're snickering.  
  
"Here lies Rose! She was good, I think. She was worthy of a corpse party, if nothing else." Sollux flicks his knuckles in a gesture you can extrapolate into raising a glass. Here, here.  
  
"Now do me!" She demands, already prepping her skirt to lie on your rug.  
  
"That's all I get?" You laugh, shoving yourself up, catching one shin with the other as the force threatens to knock you back down again.  
  
You didn't realize it before, but was Sollux always standing?  
  
"I don't--" He spits,  
  
And she's already laughing and dropping herself down so, what's the rush of ending the festivities?  
  
"Let's not do this-- Aradia,"  
  
And you're laughing for so long before you realize; the walls are all rumbling.  
  
"I don't, want to do this," He huffs; you're not sure what's shaking now, is it him, or the--  
  
The corner melts and the grey walls peel straight up, shooting past where the ceiling just was. You catch the last echo of your laugh.  
  
The cool of Sollux's skin splits a wound into the sky, now: deep, heavy purple pounding out around him. His mouth is split back past the natural line of his cheeks as he heaves, eyeballs popping and spitting hot liquid into the air.  
  
Your gut wrenches; not from fear but from watching a creature tortured. From bearing witness to the agony of someone ripping out the inside of his face.  
  
You step to the side.  
  
You step to the side, but you're not moving.  
  
This is Aradia's memory.  
  
You step back, sideways; you're watching her and you look back and you can see yourself, confused as you feel as your minds pulls back and forward between the two of you. The front of your brain starts to rattle as hot tendons pull up the sides of your vision. You're not supposed to be her in these. You're watching it as you're living it and you feel a hot scream pull out from the base of your tongue,  
  
You feel your skin peel away as the note hits the highest octave you can hear; it's inhuman.  
  
Mechanical.  
  
You vomit.  
  
Your room is empty.  
  
Your bed hasn't moved.  
  
==>  
  
This is a new kind of hangover, you guess. Dragging your arm along the wall as you text your girlfriend, you hear the soft shifting of silk as it rubs and re-arranges under your arm. It's sending a hum down the front of your brain as much as it's rumbling the contents of your stomach. You can't tell if you need one to stop more than you need the other to stay.  


TT: You're sure I'm not uprooting your entire day by coming over so early?

TT: Late?

TT: Pointlessly?

TT: Unannouncedly?

GA: That Is Without Question Not A Real Earth Word

GA: But It's Actually An Extremely Convenient Time

GA: That I Wish You Were Awake For More Often

GA: Though No Doubt It's Not For Any Reason You're Likely To Be Enjoying

  
Another push back, your thumb running the line of your cheekbone towards your ear as you smirk. Just another raucous alone night with the eccentric Rose Lalonde. How could you forget that's all that had been going on?

You don't stop yourself from smirking this time.

==>

The light that hits you when you walk in sends a rocket through your brain you weren't prepared for. You throw a hand over your face like it's the middle of the fucking day and you're actually outdoors for once. You don't even know if it's you or Kanaya doing this, so you just stumble over to her like an inebriated muppet regardless.

She leans over you and dims a light, and you catch the pulse of her skin as it adjusts to the room. Your head is still throbbing and some of this light is still definitely from you. You watch the golden glow hum off the tables in her room, radiating into you in hot waves. You squint.

Something can be overwhelmingly Good, you guess. So evolved that catching up with it overwhelms your spirit. You keep your eye on the golden hum, watching it fizzle out and dissipate as it hits the untouched air in the rest of the room. You tuck your knees up under your chin, silk skirt bumping against a patch of stubble. You picture a pesterlog chat years ago with John, gold bristling into the artificial angles and edges of the familiar blue font. The first time it started poking in and intruding onto your every day life and you were forced to fucking consider it, the bottom of your stomach dropping out onto your intestines. You cackle, ice cold, into your skirt. 

Remember when you thought you were in love with John?

"Wanna talk about it?" You hear over your shoulder. If you didn't know better, you'd think she was making fun of you.

You catch her over your shoulder and realize you don't know better. She was definitely making fun of you.

You forget she knows things about you.

"I'm just thinking about John," you admit.

You feel her move beside you and you realize you're very pointedly not looking at her, but you catch the path of her hands on her skirt just on the corner of your line of sight. You guess your line of sight is focused on this big fucking lamp in the middle of the room.

God, it's garish. You love that she puts it right in the fucking centre of her room, too.

You hear the familiar crack and pop of her clearing her throat as she sits beside you,

"I didn't necessarily spend a lot of time getting to know the trolls I already allegedly knew,"

You can feel her staring at the ugly lamp, too.

"But it's...weird. To not see them. Dream bubbles couldn't even properly deliver Feferi and Aradia and Sollux. They just...came, because they're the only ones that seem to have any concept that there's a timeline with living versions of their friends available somewhere in paradox space.

That even if paradox space is concocting some sort of appropriately malevolent scheme to keep all your friends away, it's still hard to not take it personally."

You watch her bite a knuckle, the faint glow off her skin bouncing back onto her hand from her teeth. An "X" hums where her the skin hits her tooth.

You shift your head back to look at the ugly lamp.

"Mmh," you manage, speaking directly into your sleeve. You lift your head just enough to address the lamp.

"It's, insulting almost, thinking about it. How there's no iteration of any of your friend anywhere in the timelines stupid and optimistic enough to feel the need to visit you. That dream bubbles with thousands of versions of your stupid dead friend couldn't co-ordinate enough to bump into something even near you."

You clear your throat. It's wetter in there than you'd like it to be.

"And John was exceptionally stupid and stupidly optimistic, so he _really_ had no excuse."

You feel the guilt of stealing a visit from Kanaya's friends away from her clawing at the back of your mind, but you're too tired to obsess about it. You feel her cold hand on the back of your head intead.

"I would accuse most of our dead friends of being idiots,"

you feel her finger curl around a lock of hair at the base of your neck, sending a quiet hum up and down your brain stem as it does,

"when they could be here, having the time of their lives crying alone in a depressing grey room,"

you guess you are crying,

"they're out reliving memories and exploring the expanses of paradox space with no obligation to the alpha timeline whatsoever. Really outrageous lack of commitment to Not Being Total Idiots, in my opinion."

A laugh chokes into a much wetter sound beside you, so you guess you both _are_ just crying alone in a room while every instance of every person you've ever had to lose is completely out of reach. You hear a sob choke into a laugh and you feel yourself do it, too, and you start to laugh harder as your mind hurdles past the fact that your dead friend is either totally indifferent to finding you or too powerless to even try into the memory that you just lived through the high-definition, first-person re-enactment of the murder of one of Kanaya's friends.

You stop laughing.

You take a deep breath.


	9. Buck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for some somewhat grisly descriptions of death, gore, and talk of abuse. Stay safe, everybody, and enjoy!

**Be Kanaya.**  
  
A half-sweep is a long time to heal, you think.  
  
You're lying in your bed, stiff and fully clothed, staring down at your abdomen.  
  
"Fully clothed" is misleading despite being technically true. The long piece of fabric usually decorating your centre is folded on a shelf a few feet away from you, and the blown-out shreds of your favourite shirt sit in a tight circle against your skin.  
  
You look at your meal sac.  
  
The troubling part of this activity, as is always the case, is that your meal sac stares back. It's exposed to the air, vibrating as networks of blood pathways and sinew work naked above it. Your innards are a writhing symphony of blood and fibre stretching across the chasm that was once uninterrupted skin.  
  
You try, once again, to grapple with the fact that you’ve had a view directly into the contents of your gut for almost half a sweep. The most disturbing, you think, wasn’t the era when it was just a hole directly through the middle of you, but when the first signs of your new spine and meal sack first started to writhe and burst into the empty circle you’d been staring at every night since the deaths of your friends.  
  
You are…tired, of your mind always drifting back here.  
  
It’s not just the visions: slick pink tears bouncing off a river of blood before being consumed as the scream hit the walls and bounced, metallic, through everyone’s skulls.  
  
It’s not just the visions! Eridan, face flush and curled inwards, contorted with hatred borne from entitlement and you, confronting your own expendability at the end of a pointed stick in a fragile man’s hands.  
  
It isn’t the visions! Of the brown blood coating the air and dripping into your breath sacs as bone kicked and muscles convulsed under the pounding of metallic teeth under your hand.  
  
It really isn’t the visions that disturb you still.

It’s the memories.  
  
You remember, childhood friend bucking under the weight of the saw chewing into his guts, the insides of a person you were once enlisted to protect emptying out as Equius scrambled to sew wire and artifice into unforgiving piles of flesh, and you remember the taste. Medical spectacle laid out before you and the splash of vomit hitting the floor as Karkat buckled under the weight of his friends reduction to a mass of pulsing organ and steel, and you remember the _taste_. The sweet butter and honey of his blood coating your lips and you had to stop yourself from breathing deeper just to pull it all inside of you. The thick, sweet scent permeating the air that lingered even as blood dried on metal and Tavros was reborn from a nest of brown and wires.  
  
You remember the taste.  
  
You remember Rose making fun of you for your dedication to that sash when she saw it, clean, hung around your waist on your first training day. How she made fun of your inability to help her alchemize anything useful until fashion is involved. You remember, the night before, watching your veins swell with Eridan’s blood as you finally gave in and sucked it dry.  
  
You adjust yourself in bed to try and shake out the thoughts. You're tired of waking up early.  
  
You find this is often what happens when you try and "sleep in", so maybe you should stop letting yourself be consumed by painful memories of your dead friends as a daily ritual. Rose and Dave make it sound like so much fun, though, you can't resist trying in case it ever feels like it's _actually_ supposed to. Unless Rose and Dave have just been over-hyping the activity for half a sweep to fuck with you.  
  
Actually, come to think of it, that seems extremely likely.  
  
You look at your recuperacoon and wonder if it would be any more relaxing to stay in there while you wait for everyone to get up, but the texture of the jelly is so gross you can't imagine hanging out in there once you're actually conscious. Sometimes it's so unpleasant you just deal with the nightmares and sleep on the "Mat-Riss". At least the familiarity of another person is attached to it once you wake up.  
  
You give up on "relaxing" and force yourself out of bed. At least you got yourself on a slightly less grim plotline internally, but you feel frivolous sitting around thinking about advanced sleeping in techniques. If you're going to waste your time thinking about something it might as well be something that's not likely just an elaborate Strilonde prank.  
  
You sit down at your vanity slab and consider your reflection, turning your head a few times for good measure. Rose has been telling you about self-loathing and female beauty on earth. Human women, _allegedly_ , have a lot of self-worth evaluation wrapped up in their flesh packaging. You don't like to assume Rose is messing with you when she talks so seriously about things, but it's hard not to try and keep on your toes about things when they sound ridiculous to you, even if there's no one around to have anything to say about it.  
  
Beauty, she says, is viewed as similarly frivolous on earth, but is in some ways mandatory. It's stuff like that she says that makes you think she's fucking with you. You guess earth might have passed through more layers of paradox space since it's a second iteration of existence, but...a weird part of you feels compelled to understand it. Something stirs in your gut every time you think of it.

Maybe it's just your meal sack trying to regrow itself.  
  
You blink a little extra hard onto your makeup brush and try not to think about that.  
  
You keep twisting your head to try and get a sense of responsibility for your face. It's hard to hate, because you didn't make it. You always like the structure of your face, because it's someone else's handiwork. The way the knots peel down your cheekbone and how soft blue pours out from every spot that light touches, it's...nice, you think.  
  
It's much easier, and you are blinking carefully onto the brush with your other eye to not get too out of control with this thought either, to hate the personality you're responsible for. Hating parts of yourself you didn't create seems ungrateful.  
  
You dip the brush back into the paint, pulling it out slowly and rubbing the excess on the side.  
  
Hating the parts of yourself you have control over is the only logical conclusion.  
  
You feel the cold paint as it slides across your face and your mind drifts back to exactly what you're trying to keep it away from. It's fruitless, you guess, trying to ignore the first thought you've had in a day.  
  
**Be Future Kanaya**  
  
You feel the sticky burn of salt on your face as you feel yourself choke up, watching as Rose does the same beside you. Staring down at your hands as the wet sobs and chokes echo off your block’s walls, you hear a break in Rose’s cries as she takes one deep breath, then another.  
  
“Kanaya,” she manages, and you catch her pulling a strand of hair out of her face. Something moves in you as you watch her re-arrange herself, but you make an effort to squash it down and listen. There's another pause as she composes herself, staring down at her lap as she wraps a hand around her arm and digs a thumb into her wrist. She takes another breath,  
  
"How do you feel about a little dream bubble rendezvous next time we actually get a visit from the unreliable dead flakes we used to call friends?"  
  
She moves her head to look at you, eyes half-lidded as her mouth pulls into a slick grin. The feeling you were trying to ignore bolts through you as you feel her refuse to get close to you over, and over, and over. As she composes herself, as she tidies up stray particles of emotional vulnerability hanging in the air, as she tucks every connection away on a mental shelf to be studied later. And you snap.  
  
Black affection spills over your face and you feel the heat of it behind your eyes as you make contact. Your arm around her waist and your hand grabbing hers so hard you can feel her pulse as you kiss her. Kismetic energy rockets through your lips and shakes the core of your romantic foundation, and all she can do it laugh, slide her lips to one side and ask,  
  
"I'll take that as a "yes"?"  
  
You don't know how she doesn't feel the difference.  
  
**Be Kanaya**  
  
It's hard to get out from under the weight of what your mind forced into you as soon as you woke up.  
  
You picture the teeth of your chainsaw biting into Tavros' flesh again and wonder, despite telling yourself back then that it was for him, if you were really just trying to help her finish the job.

You were supposed to be _helping_ him, you were supposed to be the reason his life wouldn't be endangered by a girl who felt too fucking black about a boy who could never live up to her standards. And you couldn't. You couldn't act like a normal fucking troll because every time she'd do something horrible, say something he didn't deserve to hear, have him sign off of trollian because she'd obviously made him cry, you felt for her everything you were supposed to be feeling for him.

  
The mix of spite and pity that made you such a valuable part of the balancing act...how are you supposed to balance anything if you can't feel half of the equation?  
  
Every time he snapped under the pressure of your failure as an auspistice all you could think was how you wanted him out of there so someone that could actually handle her could take his place.

You tried so hard to suppress the feelings that always stemmed from failing to protect him and tried, over and over, to invest, to care, to stop her from treating another troll with such a fucked up level of malice. You stiff, twice, trying to control the fluids in your face as they try to spill over your hard work. Because you have to wonder if forcing yourself to feel the wrong things made it worse for him. If every time you pushed her away from him without resolve, it made the game of pushing back that much more fun for her.  
  
If you could have spared him if you'd pushed him out of the equation from the start.  
  
You rub a thumb under your eye as you're forced to agree with something Vriska once said:  
  
Being selfish is the best thing you can do for other people.  
  
**Be Kanaya, one minute later.**  
  
You pull the paint, once again, across your eye-lid.  
  
You remember, early on your meteor trip, Vriska walking up to you and reaching for your gut as you flinched away, cackling and asking you how it was healing. And you remember, blue blood pulsing underneath her skin so strongly you could smell it as you dipped to back away from her reach. Moving back a second time because, chide you for being paranoid as she did, you did it because of how your body reacted as you pictured her neck under your teeth.  
  
The memory washes over you and you look back at your meal sack, pulsing as your blood pusher shoots strands of purple and green around the cavern in your gut. An unpleasant realization finally bubbles up from your brain stem;  
  
You’re hungry.


	10. Squelch

**Be future Rose.**

You message Karkat.

**Be Dave.**

You sit in Karkat’s room.

He’s sitting, hunched over, on the floor by his desk. Aliens set up their rooms really weirdly. Terezi’s is like this, too: Everything is crammed all into one corner and half the room is just empty space. You know his room on Alternia wasn’t like this, too, because he’s shown you pictures of it and, fucked up decorating tastes aside, it’s pretty normal in terms of furniture and space distribution. Is it a Terezi thing? Is he, like, ganking her interior design choices? Is it, like, magnetism? Like from the meteor?

_Are trolls sensitive to magenetism?_

“No, we’re not.” He grumbles, and he doesn’t look up at you. He’s got his socked feet pressed together as he works on something in his lap. What the fuck is he working on in his lap?

“Oh. Ok,” you muster, not understanding that you’ve started leaning closer to look at what he’s working on.

He does, though, and he stops what he’s doing to look up at you.

“Do you want to…hang out down here?” His teeth hang over his lip as he asks you, the little snarl you can now associate with his genuine expressions of interest. He shifts and sticks out his hand like you can’t get off a chair yourself. Well, maybe you can’t, whatever.

You strategically push past his hand as you get up to move next to him, shifting next to him on the floor as you peek over his shoulder.

“What are you doing, dude?” You hold your head above his shoulder and you can feel his arm resting on the front of yours. You shift.

“I’m trying to fix this FUCKING sickle we alchemized,” he yells, the cracks in his voice bouncing back at you off the walls.

You look down and see that the blade of his scythe is curved behind his leg as he holds the handle in his lap, scraping the base with a small black stone. The noise isn’t as grating as you’d expect despite the sparks that shoot off it periodically. You watch his nose and lip pulling up in frustration every time he runs over an inconsistency in the metal.

“I thought the combination would be smoother,” he clarifies, and you note the small specks of material creeping up the blade. You remember this one, you think, from Karkat tossing different codes and scraps of equipment from the meteor’s basement into the alchemizer after Vriska had told you all to stop making hilarious shit that was cooler than she was and start making real shit you might actually need.

Apparently Karkat was taking it a little more seriously than you had been,

“You can’t just keep combining shit on there until it flattens it out?”

You didn’t even know he knew how to work with metal like that. You watch his hands as they scrape, pull back, run over thr blade and repeat until something pulls in your chest and your force yourself to stop.

“I already tried that,” he spits onto the wall in front of you,

“This is the best I can get without sacrificing the structural integrity of this stupid bone we found. It’s strong but it’s being a fucking PAIN in my globes,” he punctuates the last part as if the sickle is going to be intimidated into complying.

“I dunno, man, does it matter if it’s a little bumpy?” Your fingers fall onto its surface, running over one of the bumps Karkat hasn’t gotten to yet. If anything it would probably just tear somebody up worse.

“YES it matters,” he punctuates, “if it’s not smooth enough for the tip to pierce something, if there’s resistance after it punctures something and can’t get quickly through whatever vital organ I’m aiming for, it makes a difference.”

There’s something that pulls in you, again, when he talks about running the tip of it through somebody, but you swallow it again. His eyes cast down and you see his hand slowing slightly.

“It’s not exactly a chance I can afford to take.”

The third pull is one too many, and your hand finds his as you lean into his side.

“Hey, man. Cut that shit out,” He’s stopped scraping entirely, and your free hand tucks a curl behind his ear as you watch his face.

“I’m not going to let myself be detrimental to what we’re trying to do just because I feel shitty about my own massive failings as a competent warrior. It’s not exactly time to be tending to my own neurotic obsessions about my self-worth. It doesn’t help to pretend you’re less worthless than you are at something.”

“Man, come on,” Your thumb hits the side of his face as he stares into his lap. You can hear his skin rubbing into itself on his forehead as he frowns. God, aliens are fucking weird.

“Cut that shit out. We have tons of time to stress out about this shit, there’s no sense doing it all right this fucking instant.”

He still stubbornly holds onto the rock despite the sickle hanging loosely in his lap, now unsupported by his other hand. He keeps glaring at it as you hear a slow click reverberating from his chest up into his throat. You find yourself rearranging his hair again in response, running your fingers over his forehead as you push another curl to the side.

“Thanks,” he mutters, and you can feel him lean into your hand slightly. He stays like that for a moment, head pressed into your hand as your fingers loosely filter through the roots of his hair, and sighs out the last bit of tension you can see in his body.

“You can’t pacify me out of hating myself forever, you know.” He says it to your elbow.

“It’s better than nothing.” You offer, stomach humming as he leans into you.

“We’ve still got, what, a sweep until you have to give a shit. Might as well enjoy the ride while the stakes aren’t too high.”

“The stakes are _always_ high,” he protests into your armpit.

“Whatever, dude.” You run your hand back and forth through his hair, wondering if he’ll protest your limp response, but it looks like you did pacify him out of his self-loathing at least a little. You relax a little, too, until you feel a hand on your back as he shifts to sit up.

“Thanks,” he repeats, more directly this time. You feel  the callus on his thumb as it rubs the back of your neck, and you watch his eyes as they dart around his room.

“It’s just…hard. Not to freak out about this constantly. I have so fucking little to offer it’s like, I can’t afford to let anything slip. Every fucking thing I do could be the thing that costs us everything.” His hand stops moving, still on the back of your neck.

You picture the tip of his scythe, puncturing something.

“You don’t worry?” He asks, eyes flicking to you before heading back to the ground,

“About fucking up the entire mission? And everything being your fault? Like being a total liability isn’t the number one fucking topic on your mind on this meteor?”

Puncturing.

You have a picture of yourself, from his seat on the ground, machismo bursting through the hot red of your coat as you cut through something, sword in tact, stupid fucking knight bristles flapping in the breeze,

“Uh,”

And you cut, tip of your sword sliding through the front of something’s torso, and you picture Karkat’s hands, and you think of the tip of his scythe, little bubbles of bone peeking up out of the top,

“I gotta go.” You announce, motioning conspicuously quickly to stand up before you can realize you’re Being Weird. As the concept hits you, you make an effort to take a breath, bending down to plant a quick kiss on Karkat.

“I’m sorry, man, I just remembered I have shit to do with Rose today. Can we hang soon, though?”

His eyebrows are alarmingly low as he yells a confused, “SURE,” at you, and your fingertips fall off his face as you all but run out the door.

– carcinoGenecist [CG] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 16:20 –

CG: DOES 3 WORK FOR YOU?

CG: TOMORROW?

CG: I WANT TO SEE YOU TOO

TG: yeah man for sure

TG: sorry i had to cut it short i cant believe i forgot about this shit

CG: IT’S FINE

TG: cool

– turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGenecist [CG] at 16:27 –

CG: I’M NOT SURPRISED MY RANCOROUS SELF LOATHING WAS A HORRIBLE FUCKING TIME SINK

CG: SHIT NOW I’M JUST RAMBLING ABOUT IT INTO AN EMPTY CHAT CLIENT FOR EVEN FUCKING LONGER

CG: FUCK. SORRY

\- carcinoGenecist [CG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 16:30 -

– turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGenecist [CG] at 16:41 –

TG: yo karkat

TG: we’re both knights right?

CG: YEAH?

TG: do you ever wonder

TG: like

TG: why we’re both these fucking hyper-masculine symbols

TG: these fucking blood red dudes with swords or sickles or whatever

TG: fucking penetrative objects that’s such a fucking thing in male culture

TG: do you ever feel like we’re like

TG: kind of a cosmic joke

TG: we’re like these comical symbols of hyper-masculinity without even the fucking self-awareness, like the tongue-in-cheek shit

TG: it just seems corny, these two bros as these fucking unironic dude symbols, broing it up and doing all this gay shit and not even having the self awareness to know how this fucking looks from an objective standpoint or whatever

CG: WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO TALK ABOUT STUFF LIKE THIS?

CG: WE’RE NOT SYMBOLS FOR ANYTHING.

CG: WHY DO YOU ALWAYS MAKE IT SEEM LIKE SOMEONE IS WATCHING US AND FORMULATING THESE CONCLUSIONS? NO ONE IS THINKING THIS ABOUT US BUT YOU.

CG: DO YOU THINK WE’RE A JOKE?

CG: IS THIS A JOKE TO YOU?

CG: AM I A FUCKING JOKE TO YOU, DAVE?

– turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGenecist [CG] at 17:00 –

– turntechGodhead [TG] started pestering carcinoGenecist [CG] at 17:01 –

TG: im sorry

– turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGenecist [CG] at 17:01 –

CG: IS THIS WHY YOU HAD TO LEAVE?

CG: GOD DAMMIT DAVE

**Be Rose**

– turntechGodhead [TG] started pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 17:05 –

TG: hey

TG: im coming over

– turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 17:05 –

**Rose: Open the door for your brother**

You open the door for your brother.

Dave shuffles in and you uncaptchalogue a beer, vaulting it at him as he moves past your peripherals. He drops himself down across from you against a second mattress parallel to yours, eyes obviously darting around behind his glasses. Unscrewing the lid from the alchemized bottle, he tosses it accross your floor with a level of comfort only an ecto-family member could have on his first visit to your room. You catch him drinking the most hysterically polite sip of beer you’ve ever seen and indulge him enough to follow suit. You know he’s trying to give off the impression of an effortless swig while he tries to pace himself, so you think it’s appropriate your mirror bounce back the opposite.

“I feel like I’ve never been in here,” he notes, head fidgeting around as he prepares to unfilter.

Maybe it’s an odd observation, but you always expected him to be better looking. Not that it would be relevant to you, but you figured he would have something material to back up his entire persona.

Maybe the Web fame would project something onto him if you didn’t know him so well.

He looks around at the layers of clutter crawling over your room, pushing himself up as he rambles. He picks up an object that you’d been describing to yourself as a Mysterious Orb the whole time you’d known it, and you catch his underwhelming profile one more time: his chin pulled in just enough to be too weak to carry his massive nose, aviators just shy of covering up the pucker of his deeply bagged eyes, and the hint of cheekbone you thought he had turned out to be a grisly line of pockmarks. You’re sure he’s not even unattractive. You just expected to be impressed by him.

The orb pops open and he clicks it shut, repeating the process a few more times before he says, “That’s some alien bullshit.”

He offers it out on one arm, popping it open and closed 2 more times for effect.

“Like, that’s all it does. Do aliens just get off on making wildly misleading shit all the time?” Open, close.

“Something this cool you’d think it would like, unlock some fucking mystic portal or something. I swear to god this is the troll equivalent of those fucking Hober dude’s balls.”

Right, like he would know the term Hoberman Ball and forget the easier part of the word. You uncaptchalogue another bottle and drop the empty behind your bed when he turns around.

The expanded iteration of the ball beats in your head, echoes twice.

“It’s technically the more basic form of that kind of object,” You muse,

“They’re the originators, technically speaking, of all the concepts and forms we had on earth. Our idea of what that ball should be is just an altered copy, isn’t it?” One more echo: a shitty plastic toy from the nineties stuck in your head like a song.

“I guess, uh, yeah, but I’m still calling bullshit on an alien race that molds intricate golden orbs just to pop open and closed 10 times and get bored of. At least we had the decency to expand on the concept.” He leaves it, open form, on the dresser he pulled it off of and walks back over. He makes a silent commitment of trying to keep up with you.

“No Karkat today?”

He shrugs, too deliberate, rolling his shoulder back onto the wall as he answers,

“He said he had some shit to do today. I dunno what shit there is to do on this meteor but…I feel like I haven’t seen you in a billion years.”

You can already feel yourself settling into a familiar pool of feeling, and your shoulder hits your bedside table to math Dave’s too-casual slouch.

You try not to think about the murderous elephant in the room.

“You’re just not adept enough at working the system,” you form him.

“The system…” He drifts,

“Haha, dude, _Vriska_?”

You snort, and his mouth cracks into a genuine emotion.

“If he’s with Terezi I’m frankly impressed,” you muse,

“tearing her away from Our Fearless Leader isn’t exactly an easy feat. There might be some hope for his tactical skills after all.”

“What? Don’t be like that. The dude has been boning up on his, uh, warrior stuff or whatever. Plus you can’t judge if you never show up to anything that’s just writing training session fanfiction at that point.”

Your head hits the wall with a light _thump_ as a laugh rolls out of you.

“You need to give my writing more credit, Dave. Although I’ll admit avoiding an activity in order to rewrite it is an interesting writing project…”

“You’re just dodging the fact that you’re rewriting it with wizards all over the goddamn place.” You catch him jump when the force of your laugh hits the air, but he recovers quickly, catching the pace of the conversation.

“I’m just saying, I’m pretty sure you’re cloaked up in some wizard garb while we’re in there getting the shit beaten out of us, poring over your first tome of The Meteor Crew’s Brush With Zolgarth the Bespectacled One, LARPing into your own muse for this shit.” He hits a patch of confidence and tosses his empty bottle at your trash can, carried with enough faith to actually land smoothly.

“I think you might have to kill one of us off in real life for tome two. You’re gonna be in way too deep by that point…need the emotional climaxes to really stick. We should start drawing straws at the next session; really save ourselves the emotional drudgery of having to pick somebody and having them get all pissed off about it.”

You tilt the base of another beer towards him, and he hesitates for a moment before grabbing it.

“Thanks,” he manages, pausing just short of his first sip.

“…I don’t think he went to go see Terezi, though. Shit doesn’t seem that, uh. Good between them.”

Be future Rose.

Walking down the hall with the familiar slide of your robe under your arm, you hear a voice drifting out of the vent in its usual meandering fashion.

The second voice, though: that one’s unusual.

Be Rose.

“Oh?”

He shrugs, cuts himself off conveniently with the belated sip. Takes his time building the anticipation as he wets the everloving shit out of his whistle.

“I don’t know…me and her used to hang out before Vriska really dug her claws into her, but with them it was always kind of weird? Like never chilling together for too long when we were all together or just having conversations with me instead of each other. Like they’d talk a little or whatever but stuff was so obviously weird between them. And I never see Terezi any more but we’re obviously cool. But her and Karkat seem, uh. Way worse.”

You nod, already a bit too fuzzy, head dipping down a bit too low and slowly. Maybe the elephant is a burden your room is shouldering alone.

“You think Vriska had something to do with it?”

“She made it worse, yeah, like no question when does she ever not, but I think it’s more about the two of them…Karkat didn’t say their history was that weird and I’m no fucking detective but from my perspective it seems like shit is _extremely_ fucking weird.”

“Maybe he went to patch things up? Un-weird the whole situation?” You offer helpfully. He just offers you another delayed shrug.

“Maybe.”

“He’s good friends with Kanaya, though…maybe I should arrange an alien playdate with them so they can discuss the unweirdening of the Terezi situation. I’m sure it’d put a thorn in Vriska’s side we could all coral around together,”

You raise your bottle to the concept. Dave doesn’t reciprocate.

“You… _really_ don’t like her, huh?”

“As if you’re a huge fan! I thought her general character was just, objectively awful. That’s her Archetype, you know? Bad.”

“I mean she’s annoying, yeah, way too full of herself and can’t stay out of anyone’s business. But she’s tolerable if you’re not fighting her on shit.”

Sip, shrug.

“Does her history with Kanaya really bug you that much?”

There’s something about those glasses that actually pulls at a nerve when he stares you down behind them. Like locking eyes with a fly.

“Not to my knowledge.” You return, and maybe, just maybe, your shrug is a bit too rehearsed this time, too.

“I just find her approach pointlessly calculated. We’re not so defunct of ability we’d fall apart without her careful guidance. She just wants to think we are.”

Now it’s your turn to sip, dropping another bottle behind your bed, but this time without the charade.

“Yeah alright whatever super cool battle of the egos that’s totally not involved with any unsettled emotional turmoil I get it. It’s just, uh,”

The neck of the bottle twists in his hands as he considers it, considers the hands around it, then points his bug-eyes back up at you.

“You know we’re going to have to figure out how to work together eventually, right? We, uh. We can’t put off that this is coming forever.”

The silence sits still between you two for a moment, giving way to you as you raise your freshly uncaptchalogued drink and respond,

“I’ll drink to that.”

**== >**

You are both raucously exchanging anecdotes about your alien consorts as the social air humidifies between you. He throws his arms on top of his knees forcefully as he recounts a conversation between Karkat and Kanaya you’d never been privy to, and you can feel the laughter forcing out a slick line under your eyeballs. He laughs so hard you can feel his throat vibrate when you tell him about the confused conversation about houseplants she subjected you to the other day.

He comes back down from his laughter high, letting his eyes make a rare debut as he takes off his glasses to wipe them. “Fuck. I honestly forget how _fucking weird_ they are, not talking to another human on this rock all the time. Today I asked Karkat if trolls were affected by magnetism. _Magnetism_ , Rose. Imagine the fucking heyday they’re having with that shit when we’re not around.”

The tears are now flowing freely down your face as you absolutely fucking lose it over the image of Dave earnestly asking Karkat if he’s got a north and a south pole he’s just never told Dave about.

“I don’t know what the fuck shit he found to do when I left today,” Dave laughs, lucky you’re too drunk to catch him being too drunk to lie,

“But if he’s drifting to the north end of this meteor I think I win a cosmic bet.”

Be future Rose.

– tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering carcinoGenecist [CG] at 22:36 –

TT: I hope you’re having fun with Gamzee, Karkat.

You hit send before you can realize what level of intimacy the sounds shuffling out of the vents might actually represent.

**Be Rose.**

'Fucking magnets,” you offer, having long ago switched to a glass of wine that you feel, once again, compelled to raise.

“How _do_ they work?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think that last line reads as something implicitly sexual, but it's not supposed to necessarily. It's more supposed to be a vague definition of "intimacy", emotional included.


	11. Convulse

**Dave: Continue being Dave**  
  
– turntechGodhead [TG] began trolling carcinoGenecist [CG] at 03:14 –  
  
TG: hey  
  
TG: did you still want me to come over  
  
TG: or like  
  
TG: is it still cool if i come over  
  
CG: YOU ASK THIS WHEN YOU’RE ALREADY LATE FOR THE PLANS WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE?  
  
TG: fuck sorry dude  
  
CG: YEAH THAT’S FINE  
  
TG: i got nervous  
  
CG: I STILL WANT TO SEE YOU TOO  
  
**Dave: Stop being Dave**  
  
You stop being Dave.  
  
You have to stop being Dave because, to your knowledge, you have never been Dave.  
  
Not even for a mother fucking second.  
  
– carcinoGenecist [CG] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] at 03:16 –  
  
CG: HEY  
  
CG: HE’S COMING OVER AFTER ALL  
  
CG: SO I CAN’T  
  
CG: SORRY  
  
TC: it all is  
  
TC: WHAT IT ALL MOTHERFUCKING WILL BE  
  
TC: :o)  
  
CG: OK. SORRY  
  
TC: :o)  
  
CG: (:B  
  
– carcinoGenecist [CG] ceased trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] at 03:19 –  
  
**Stop not being Dave.**  
  
**Dave: Be Terezi.**  
  
You are now **Terezi Pyrope.**  
  
**Terezi: Check phone messages**  
  
Your first task as Terezi Pyrope is to refuse to comply with narrative instructions.  
  
You have been ignoring your phone for quite some time.  
  
You are sitting, legs crossed, on the floor by your recuperacoon.  
  
You are studying.  
  
Dave sits in your mind, at the intersection of two potential desicions, and you focus on keeping your breathing even as you feel the familiar tug behind your eyes, branching accross your temples. Reaching further and further into future decision trees isn't something you can do instantaneously, so trying to massage the future pathways out of your mind has taken up a lot of your free time recently. You're only about a sweep ahead at this point, and pushing ahead through mundane decisions is proving to be a more significant test of your powers than you'd planned for.  
  
You blame Dave.  
  
No, really, you blame Dave.  
  
Every time there’s a critical junction in his potential decision making, the potential for a time travel relapse bubbles unexpectedly back up into the realm of possibility; or, initially unexpected at least. You’ve now become painfully accustomed to progressing through individual life trajectories until the recursive looping of Dave’s pathway potentials start interfering with your sense of progress.The focus it takes to navigate these potential outcomes has a physical effect on you: the distinct pull of your stretched abilities reaches backwards accross your think pan, with a hum that resonates through your skull the longer you maintain focus. The rhythmic churning of your own mind would add stability to the exercize if it weren’t for the increasingly tight pinch pulling back from the front of your face. You are pushing further and further forward into his future desicions as you continue to focus on his potential, but your distance from his actual role in your future battle is, to be frank, really chafing your nubs.  
  
The stretching pressure in your starts to bleed into a slice of pain; a sign that your mind is forcing you to finish charting Dave’s time-looped bullshit for another day. You let your gander bulbs ease open as you climb back down the branches of your future meteor companion's mind, feeling the soft pat of your bulbcurtains on your cheeks as you blink yourself back into the space around you.  
  
You have, apparently, been ignoring your phone for a _very_ long time.  
  
 -– turntechGodhead [TG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC] at 02:47 –-  
  
TG: hey man  
  
TG: you gotta help me with something  
  
GC: SOM3TH1NG BLOODY 4ND HORR1F1C? 1M HONOUR3D TO B3 TH3 ON3 YOU TURN TO WH3N YOU N33D HELP CL34N1NG UP FL3SH CHUNKS STUCK TO TH3 W4LLS OF YOUR R3SP1TEBLOCK >:]  
  
TG: what the fuck  
  
TG: no  
  
TG: i just need advice about karkat  
  
GC: OH? 4 LOV3RS SP4T?  
  
GC: 4 BOUT OF C4L1G1NOUS V4C1LL4T1ON SO H34T3D TH4T YOUR3 NOW S33K1NG L3G4L 4DV1C3?  
  
GC: OR M4YB3 4 P4RTN3R 1N CR1M3?  
  
GC: K4RK4T *W4S* MY FR13ND BUT 1 C4N B3 P3RSU4D3D TO H3LP D1SPOS3 OF YOUR 3X LOV3R…FOR 4 PR1C3 >:]  
  
TG: holy shit dude  
  
TG: no none of that bloodthirsty weird shit youre obviously getting all hot and bothered over  
  
TG: i just need some normal ass friend advice  
  
GC: BOOOOOORING >:[  
  
TG: yeah cool shut up  
  
TG: anyway  
  
TG: uh  
  
TG: you guys dont have any concept of being uh  
  
TG: gay  
  
TG: right  
  
TG: like everybody is just all about sharing their weird ass liquids with whoever else is around right  
  
GC: D4V3 TH4T 1S SO OBSC3N3  
  
TG: yeah yeah borderline pornographic i know  
  
TG: whatever  
  
TG: but the point is no one is gonna care if whether youre knocking troll boots with a chick or a dude right  
  
TG: thats not a thing right  
  
GC: NO D4V3 1T’S NOT *4 TH1NG*  
  
GC: TH3R3 4R3 C3RT41N 4DV4NT4G3S TO D3V3LOP1NG 4 R3L4T1ONSH1P W1TH 4 TROLL 1N 4 P4RT1CUL4R G3ND3R3D OCCUP4T1ON  
  
GC: FOR 1NST4NC3 MOST L3G1SL4C3R4TORS 4R3 F3M3L3  
  
GC: B3C4US3 W3'R3 MOR3 CUNN1NG 4ND THOROUGH 1N OUR 1NV3ST1G4T1ONS >:]  
  
GC: SO IT WOULD B3 4 W4ST3 OF TIM3 TRY1NG TO F1ND 4 M4L3 M4T3SPR1T 1F L3G4L COUNS3L 1S WH4T YOUR3 4FT3R 4S 4 R3L4T1ONSH1P P3RK  
  
GC: BUT OTH3RW1S3 1T’S NOT R34LLY *4 TH1NG* NO  
  
TG: ok cool that was a whole lot of words  
  
TG: so its not gonna make a lot of sense to a troll why its weird and confusing for a dude to date another dude  
  
TG: and why theres gonna be uh  
  
TG: some weird shit going on with that  
  
GC: NOT N3C3SS4R1LY  
  
GC: BUT TH3R3 4R3 OTH3R 3XP3CT4T1ONS W3 H4V3 ON 4LT3RN14  
  
GC: TH4T C4N B3 D1FF1CULT TO D3V14T3 FROM  
  
GC: 3V3N WH3N 1TS B3N3F1C14L TO DO SO  
  
GC: ROS3 H4S 3XPL41N3D TH3 CONC3PT TO ME B3FOR3  
  
GC: SO 1 C4N UND3RST4ND TH3 K1ND OF 3MOT1ON4L CONST1P4T1ON TH4T COULD 1NSP1R3 1N SOM3BODY >:]  
  
TG: dont you grin about someones emotional butthole problems dude  
  
TG: thats just nasty  
  
TG: also when the hell do you talk to rose  
  
TG: are you two buddies  
  
GC: W3LL D4V3 W3 H4V3 ONLY B33N H3R3 FOR H4LF 4N 3NT1R3 SW33P  
  
GC: 1T M1GHT SHOCK YOU TO L34RN W3V3 H4D T1M3 FOR MOR3 TH4N ON3 CONV3RS4T1ON 1N TH4T T1ME!  
  
GC: 1LL G1V3 YOU SOM3 T1M3 TO 4DJUST TO TH1S ST4RTL1NG R3V3L4T1ON!!! >:]  
  
TG: dude shut up i just didnt know you two hung out  
  
TG: i kinda figured she spent all her time hanging with kanaya  
  
TG: plus im amazed you sat through one of her long winded speeches about anything  
  
GC: SH3 1S PR3TTY LONG W1ND3D 1TS TRU3  
  
GC: BUT 1 4M SORT OF US3D TO TH3 L1GHT PL4Y3R 4PPRO4CH TO CONV3RS4T1ONS  
  
TG: oh right i forgot vriska was all about being long winded as shit too  
  
GC: Y34H!  
  
TG: glad we’re stuck with two players who have ‘can’t shut the fuck up’ as their aspect  
  
GC: H3Y  
  
TG: anyway  
  
TG: uh  
  
TG: its cool that you get whats hard about the whole human grappling with sexuality thing lets not get into all of that but  
  
TG: i dont think karkat gets it  
  
TG: like at all  
  
TG: and its kind of freaking me the hell out  
  
GC: Y34H K4RK4T IS K1ND OF 4N 1D1OT!  
  
TG: jesus dude  
  
GC: NOT N3C3SS4R1LY 1N 4 B4D W4Y  
  
GC: BUT H3 D3F1N1T3LY 1S  
  
GC: 1T W1LL PROB4BLY T4K3 4 LONG T1M3 OR 4 LOT OF H4ND HOLD1NG  
  
GC: ROS3 W4S SURPR1S1NGLY 1LLUM1N4T1NG ON TH3 SUBJ3CT  
  
GC: M4YB3 YOU COULD PERSU4D3 H3R TO H3LP >:]  
  
TG: oh hell no what kind of dumb idea is that  
  
TG: theres no fucking way she wouldnt do something weird with that  
  
TG: im gonna have karkat coming up to me one day like  
  
TG: oh dave i cant believe you never told me about your rare condition where youre terrified of intimacy with other men blaarrg im yelling because i yell 24 7 and dont know how to stop  
  
TG: rose told me all about the 400 doctors who came from around the globe to witness your freakish inability to even look at another dude without instantly sprouting hideous growths all over your body and also probably some kind of horrible foot fungus or something  
  
TG: wow you are so brave im so glad rose explained exactly this real scenario to me and nothing else that could have possibly contributed to your overall weirdness wow you are so brave and so totally disgusting  
  
TG: no more do i long to discover the hot bod youre continually hiding under that big ass cape from my tender troll lovin because it is probably covered in some weird nasty growths as we speak  
  
GC: WOW  
  
TG: also ha ha illuminating i get it cuz shes a light player very fucking clever  
  
GC: >:]  
  
GC: YOUR3 R1GHT D4V3  
  
GC: YOU PROB4BLY SHOULDNT 3NL1ST ROS3S H3LP W1TH TH1S PROBL3M  
  
GC: B3C4US3 1T SOUNDS L1K3 YOU H4V3 ~4 LOT~ TO WORK THROUGH 4LR34DY  
  
TG: what the fuck  
  
GC: BY3 D4V3  
  
TG: what are those fucking tildes for  
  
GC: GOOD LUCK W1TH YOUR R4R3 HUM4N PHYS1OLOG1C4L COND1T1ON  
  
TG: dont fucking tilde at me i thought we were cool  
  
-– gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased trolling turntechGodhead [TG] at 03:13 –-  
  
TG: man what the fuck  
  
**Dave: Continue not being Dave**  
  
You are now **Karkat** , one week into the meteor trip.  
  
A set of seven pins push upwards on a jagged metal spine, and a gasp falls between them as their partners are all turned away. Both sets brush against the curvature of the metal hill until their guide is forced against a wall, immobilized. There is a soft "click", but no one present in this tunnel is equipped to hear it.  
  
**Be Gamzee, one week into the meteor trip.**  
  
Gamzee: Feel the dull light of the meteor washing over you as your moirail pulls open the door to the fridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's an unnecessarily poetic description of how a lock works for anyone wondering


End file.
